Media are important. Especially the media we trust. One might express the effect of a piece of journalism (J) about, say, a particular drug or food, as a factor of media authority (A), multiplied by the…

Half a million fewer statins were dispensed to patients in the eight months following the Catalyst broadcasts.
Concept Photo/ShutterstockJune 14, 2015

Apart from proposing a co-payment for visiting doctors, the last federal budget also contained a proposal to increase the level of co-payments for medications. The government seems to have given little…

Whether the harms of statins outweigh their benefits depends on how you balance them up.
AJ Cann/FlickrAugust 4, 2014

A panel convened by medical journal BMJ to investigate whether it was right to correct rather than retract two pieces featuring a mistake about side effects from statins has endorsed the journal’s decision…

The recent retraction of an academic claim in a leading journal about the incidence of side effects from cholesterol-lowering drugs has sparked anger in the medical community and potentially undermined…

A public health own goal.
Cholesterol pills by ShutterstockMarch 20, 2014

What we know about statins comes almost entirely from commercial interests. So what we take for knowledge about their harms and benefits is actually information designed to optimise the drug makers’ responsibility…